Maintaining a household is hard enough as it is because you have to keep everything running like a well-oiled machine. And that’s on top of your other responsibilities as an adult who’s juggling a full-time job with building a family. Even people with the best time-management skills can feel overwhelmed with the sheer amount of pressure weighing on their shoulders.
That’s not even accounting for the very real possibility of dealing with pest infestations that can be harming you and your family’s wealth without your knowledge. Pests have a knack for not letting themselves known until the problem has gotten so out of hand that it can be impossible to deal with on your own.
Before your pest problems snowball into a much bigger issue, you should learn how to stop them at the source. And for that to happen, you need to keep your eyes wide open so you can identify the signs of a budding pest infestation in your midst. Here are some telltale signs you need to watch out for:
Mosquitoes
No household is immune to the occasional house flies buzzing around whenever you have fresh produce in the kitchen. That’s completely normal and shouldn’t raise an alarm. However, if you or your family is sustaining itchy bite marks from the flies, then those might not be house flies after all.
It can be difficult to spot when you have mosquitoes infesting your home because they just zip through the air like house flies and their breeding grounds aren’t exactly out in the open. But if you feel like it’s becoming a problem, then it might be time to hire experts that can perform yard mosquito treatments.
The reason for this is that mosquitoes are the most dangerous animals in the world because they are potential carriers of infectious diseases. They can breed anywhere that holds stagnant water, such as clogged gutters, slopes in the yard, or even empty garden pots that collect rainwater.
Rodents
If you often find small fecal droppings at the back of your cupboards, plastic wrappers that have been bitten through, or hear little thuds within your walls, then you might have a rodent problem at hand. Although one or two rodents can be solved with traps, it can be harder when you’re dealing with a mischief.
These tiny rodent droppings and urine may not look harmful at first, but they are among the culprits of two potentially lethal viruses: leptospirosis and hantavirus. The first condition is a bacterial disease that can manifest in the form of a mild fever. But in severe cases, leptospirosis can lead to brain swelling, organ failure, or even death.
On the other hand, hantavirus is a virus strain that can cause fever or respiratory problems, and in severe cases, death. That’s why if you’re seeing these telltale signs at home, you shouldn’t leave anything to chance because it could endanger the lives of everyone in your household.
Cockroaches
Cockroaches will forever be a sight for sore eyes, but their mere existence in your household can also bring about respiratory problems for you and your family. That’s because their droppings and carcasses release a protein that can mix with the air inside your home, which can then trigger allergic reactions or asthma attacks.
The long-term exposure to these roaches can increase your family’s chances of developing respiratory issues despite not having one in the past. Roaches can also be very unsanitary and disgusting, especially since you don’t know where they have been or what they touched beforehand.
Cockroaches breed very quickly because a female roach can lay up to 36 eggs in one go, which can hatch anywhere between 24 and 215 days. These pests also have long life spans that can reach up to almost two years unlike other insects, which is why it’s more important to get rid of them as soon as you can.
These pesky creatures may be necessary to maintain the balance in the ecosystem, but that doesn’t mean that you should breed them inside your home because their mere presence can pose a danger to your and your family’s health. It can be impossible to eradicate your home of pests, but you can keep them under control.
If you’re not familiar with the appropriate methods or chemical solutions that can solve your pest problems, it might be better to seek help from professional exterminators so you won’t put yourself at even more risk. This way, you will know that your pest problems are being handled by the experts in their fields.
